Amazon has made available a plugin for vCenter that will allow users to import VMs into EC2 right from VMware Virtual Center.

The new Amazon EC2 VM Import Connector is a virtual appliance (vApp) plug-in for VMware vCenter. Once installed, you can import virtual machines from your VMware vSphere infrastructure into Amazon EC2 using the GUI that you are already familiar with. This feature builds on top of the VM Import feature. The Connector stores separate AWS credentials for each vCenter user so that multiple users (each with separate AWS accounts) can use the same Connector. The account must be subscribed to EC2 in order to use the Connector.

You can download the Connector from the AWS Developer Tools page. You'll need to make sure that you have adequate disk space available, and you'll also need to verify that certain network ports are open (see the EC2 User Guide for more information). The Connector is shipped as an OVF template that you will deploy with your vSphere Client.

After you've installed and configured the Connector, you can import any virtual machine that needs the following requirements:

Runs Windows Server 2008 SP2 (32 or 64 bit).

Currently turned off.

Uses a single virtual hard drive (multiple partitions are OK) no larger than one terabyte.